Announcing Localscope version 2

We are nearing the first birthday of Localscope and feel proud to see how Localscope has benefited people in their daily lives. Localscope has helped people find places in the most intuitive ways possible and ensured that they get what they are looking for by seamlessly tapping into 5 diverse geo information sources. as search and retrieval is one of the primarily required applications in any field, we chose to start with it. However we have had a much larger vision of Localscope. We imagine Localscope to be a unique form of a browser that is designed to present and enable use of local information, just like web browsers present web pages. We imagine Localscope to become your high tech goggles that lets you see things around you that you otherwise couldn’t. With version 2, we are taking a big step towards this vision.

We realized that Localscope v1 is the perfect app to go to when you are looking for a new location or are in a new one. However, it isn’t very useful when people are in a familiar place, i.e. home, office, school, etc. Localscope v2 changes that. Localscope now fetches geo-tagged photo and video content from various media sources and presents a unique new view of places, people and things around you. Now even familiar places that you spend most of your time in, come alive with fresh visual perspectives that enable you to rediscover your surroundings like never before. While Panoramio presents professional quality pictures of places, the Instagram source provides creative expressions of people around you and the Youtube source lets you see all published video content that is geo-tagged to your vicinity. Since each source provides unique types of content contributed socially or professionally, the diversity of information coming together in Localscope v2 provides an un-matched local discovery experience and serves up unprecedented results when you need to find anything around you.

Our technical challenge with v2 has been that while we increased the features in Localscope by more than 2 times of v1, we strived to make it faster, snappier and more intuitive than the first version. To achieve this, under the hood we have re-architected and re-written Localscope from ground up to make it scalable and performant. Along with these fundamental additions, Localscope v2 adds a lot of features and improvements, including the all new source manager that puts you in complete control of what sources are used and even their order of appearance in the source slider.

Following is a comprehensive list of whats new in Localscope v2:

Re-imagined and redesigned to provide geo tagged rich media along with local information